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Natural Materials Project

RBG conducted research project on Natural Materials which used natural local materials and followed ancient techniques using clay and earth materials.

Our findings will be applied to the construction of buildings and water harvesting systems, as well as the production of pottery.

The goals of this project were closely tied to what comes in the RBG’s mission; to address the environmental challenges of our times.

The earth-based structures that we create at the RBG site will demonstrate what can be built using locally available natural materials, while keeping construction and maintenance costs to a minimum.

Our keywords are sustainability, compatibility with the context and duplicability.

The Natural Materials project was divided into four projects with the following goals:

Produce burnt bricks out of sediments from King Talal reservoir, to be used in building eco-friendly structures

Reconstruct the recipes of original, historical mortars and plasters from selected archeological sites in Jordan, and reproduce them for use in the RBG's buildings and water harvesting structures

Form baked-clay water pipes and channels similar to those used by the ancient Nabatean people, for natural water harvesting

Establish a pottery workshop to produce ceramic pots out of local clay and pigments, and train the local community to make pottery decorated with Islamic floral, zoomorphic, geometrical and calligraphical designs

For all these projects, the investigation of earth samples from King Talal reservoir and original mortars and plasters from historical sites was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ayoup Ghrair and Dr. Adi Said from the Royal Scientific Society (RSS).

The RBG intends to make baked-clay water channels much like this ancient Nabatean pipe.